Meet the Team

Torsa Ghosal

Papercuts Associate Editor

Shuttling between Berhampur and Kolkata as a child, Torsa learned to gather stories from the streets of Bengal, India. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of post-1945 English literature at California State University, Sacramento.

She is the author of Open Couplets (2017), published by Yoda Press in India. Her poems and short stories have appeared in venues such as The Hindu BLink, Aaduna, Poydras Review, Unsplendid, Himal Southasian, and Muse India.

Torsa’s interest in stories preceded her love for the language arts. She began to train in Katthak dance before she could write and mudras (gestures) rather than words were her preferred mode of creative expression for many years. Her journey as a writer began with poetry but soon enough she started writing features for The Statesman Voices. While still in school, she won the National Balshree Honor, awarded by the President of India for excellence in creative writing. She worked as a freelance reporter for The Times of India’s Kolkata Mirror while completing a bachelor’s degree with honors in English from St. Xavier’s College and master’s degree from Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

As a PhD student at the Ohio State University, Torsa had engaged with the South Asian community as a writer, editor, and performer. She was awarded the International Student Leadership Scholarship 2014 by the university for her community outreach initiatives.

She is also a researcher, specializing in narrative theories–-that is, the systematic study of the aesthetic experiences offered by stories across media–-and 20th-/21st- century experimental literary forms. Her critical and scholarly writings can be found in Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, South Asian Review, Media-N: Journal of the New Media Caucus, Post Script, and Latinos and Narrative Media. In the past, she has assisted the editors of the journal, Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism.